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Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2?

biorxiv.org

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Re: Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2?

#6

Post by jgeada »

So a likely extremely controversial paper being shared publicly to a non-expert audience prior to any peer-review.

Is this going to be yet one more of those “will be withdrawn after peer scrutiny but by then it is too late because the false meme has been injected into the public consciousness” things?

Re: Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2?

#8

Post by johnwdefeo »

jgeada wrote: post #6

So a likely extremely controversial paper being shared publicly to a non-expert audience prior to any peer-review. Is this going to be yet one more of those “will be withdrawn after peer scrutiny but by then it is too late because the false meme has been injected into the public consciousness” things?

I sincerely hope not. From one of the authors:

"Scientists publish papers not because the paper is the end of science, but because it is a unit of research that is valuable to share with others so that others can use this brick of knowledge and either build with it… or find its weakness and break it down...We wrote our entire analysis in R and shared our code with the world. I tried SO hard to check every single line of code and make our pipeline clear & easy to reproduce. However, despite nearly giving myself stomach ulcers checking every line and stressing about these findings, it’s possible someone finds a mistake in our work. We don’t share this work happily - this is the saddest paper I’ve ever written. We’ve shared our code precisely for that reason: we want you to see exactly what we’ve done, and if we’ve done something wrong we are open to hearing it."

As to your original concern, it is a valid one. I wrote this is response to pre-prints popularized via the press earlier this year:

-> Make bold, unjustifiable claims in the preprint; -> Ensure widespread coverage in the science press; -> Walk back those claims during peer-review; -> Get published; and then -> Watch blue checks tout original claims as "Fact!"

Re: Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2?

#9

Post by throwawaymaths »

This is brilliant: it looks at the negative space in restriction enzymes cut patterns to determine the likelihood that these sites have been engineered out. I don't see details on why they picked BSM-B1 to analyze, but the only thing is if they looked at several re sites and only reported the interesting one, that alters the meaning of the statistics to the negative of the hypothesis. (I happen to believe the lab leak hypothesis -- there are receipts if you search hard, but I think we should be careful about our evidence)

Re: Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2?

#10

Post by graeme »

jgeada wrote: post #6

So a likely extremely controversial paper being shared publicly to a non-expert audience prior to any peer-review. Is this going to be yet one more of those “will be withdrawn after peer scrutiny but by then it is too late because the false meme has been injected into the public consciousness” things?

They did share it with scientists. Here’s Francois Balloux saying he replicated the results, tried to find holes, couldn’t

https://mobile.twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1583165259...

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